It's one of those days again: Apple held a product announcement today, announcing several new products. The most important of which was rumoured about for a long time now: a smaller iPad. It's called the iPad mini, and has the potential to become the best-selling iPad - and thus, the best selling tablet.

Hardware-wise, the only thing the first 3 gens of the iPad 10" tablet impressed me with was the retina display on the iPad3 - everything else was available on other tablets in some sort of similar form.

The iPad Mini? The only impressive hardware thing seems to be the weight of thing - everything else, again, seems to be available on other 7" tablets already out.

What's quite shocking is that the 16GB iPad Mini costs 50% more than my 16GB Nexus 7. For that extortionate price, it has a lower resolution, two less CPU cores, no NFC and no GPS.

The problem is that the 7" tablet market is much more price-sensitive than the 10" market because people want something easily pocketable that doesn't cost a lot of pocket change. By making the iPad Mini actually wider and taller than the N7 and charging half as much again for, what, an extra rear camera that very few people would use, they've failed on both counts.

Being based in the UK, there's only two sub-200 pounds 7" tablets worth considering at the moment - if you're on a budget and don't care about tons of apps, the 129 pounds 64GB Playbook is a bargain (I have one) and if you want a slick 7" tablet with fast CPU/GPU and tons of apps, the Nexus 7 is still the only choice.

In the UK, Amazon dismally failed to release the original Kindle Fire (there's no technical reason why they didn't, other than sheer laziness/US-centric attitude - ther original Fire is bizarrely launching on 25th Oct in the UK for the first time and no-one in their right minds would buy it compared to the Fire HD or Nexus 7 surely?) and took a year to even bring their frankly dismal (both for users and devs) Amazon App Store to the UK.

However, a rooted/ROM'ed Kindle Fire HD in the UK - launched in 2 days! - might finally challenge the Nexus 7 here. It's our first Kindle Fire-branded tablet in the UK, but with a horribly locked down OS that just screams to be CyanagenMod'ed.

It does seem that Amazon have neglected the UK badly with their tablets and appstore (UK users missed out on a year's worth of Free App of the Day for one thing!) and as such, left it to the Nexus 7 to dominate UK 7" tablet sales (along with a Playbook spike because they're at firesale prices a la Touchpad in the UK at the moment).

Because it's "extortionate" for Apple to make a profit, _any_ profit? The Nexus is being sold at cost. If Apple sold the iPad mini at cost, I'm fairly sure it would be cheaper than the Nexus simply because of their _much_ tighter engineering and manufacturing that's pumping these things out by the millions.